The bestselling author of 'Sarum', 'London' and 'New York' explains how he
researched his latest historical novel, which is set in the French capital.

Writing historical novels can be dangerous. We need to be as accurate and as fair about the historical record as we can be, at the same time as creating our fictional characters and, hopefully, telling a good story. The challenge is weaving the fiction into the history.

So how does one set about telling a story of families down the centuries, set in a city like Paris?

First of all, no matter how well I know it – and I know Pariswell – I walk the place. For atmosphere and story locations, of course, but it’s not quite as simple as that. For novelists, the imagination is everything. The trick is to guide one’s imagination using research.

I love using old maps. When I wrote my novels on London and New York, I found wonderful historical atlases. Paris has the most lavish maps of all. I found two huge volumes of street- by-street historical maps plus a wealth of contemporaneous drawings and paintings. These inspired stories and settings.

I found delightful physical recreations of the city in the Carnavalet Museum in the Marais and photographs of C19th Paris in the little Museum of Montmartre.

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I also read extensively. Everything from tales of eighteenth-century street life to Hemingway, which enables me to people my novels with real living scenes and actual people from which to work.

Characters and plots begin to suggest themselves. One comes to know not only what actually happened in a place but – this is where the historian and the novelist meet – what might have happened.

The challenge is how to construct the thing. For that, one needs a ground plan. What were the great events down the centuries? What are the particular features of the city that are the settings for the story?

What characters do we need to tell the story? Are there particular classes of people who are important to the place? For my story, I needed an atheist revolutionary, an aristocrat and a monarchist priest. I needed manual workers, artisans, artists and writers. Who, after all, is going to build the Eiffel Tower? And what about the devious world of Balzac?

One trick I’ve learned is not to live all the time in the setting one is writing about. Spending a day or two in a place leaves a very strong impression on the retina of the mind, and it’s the memory one needs to describe, rather than the physical place itself. It’s the process that Wordsworth famously described as "emotion recollected in tranquillity". Similarly, returning to a location after an absence, however brief, one is often struck again, forcibly, by the shape of the place and its character. Live there all the time, and this sense of sharp definition and wonder inevitably becomes dulled.

I also go to quarters one might have been tempted to overlook. The streets around the Gare du Nord, for instance, hardly seem inspiring territory. Yet when I researched the films and cinemas of the 1920s Hemingway era, I came across a hidden gem. The Louxor was a well-known cinema at the intersection of the boulevards of Rochechouart and Magenta. It fell into ruin, but has just this spring re-opened, restored to its original splendour – it’s like an astounding Egyptian palace. Nearby, between the boulevard de Rochechouart and the foot of Montmartre, in a leafy little square, is the modest Theatre de l’Atelier, where Anouilh’s Antigone was performed during the German occupation.I immediately chose this as a location for a wartime Resistance drama in my story.

And I remind myself to pay attention to the five senses.

Proust claimed that the past came back to him when he tasted a madeleine. For me it is the smell of gauloises and urine in the streets – a fainter memory nowadays but vivid to any of us who have entered middle age. The feel of the cold wind in the cemetery of Pere Lachaise, the sight of the white blossoms of the horse chestnuts in May. Or the beauty of the unicorn tapestries in the medieval Cluny Museum, or the image of the Gare Saint-Lazare captured in many impressionist paintings.

For me, playing music while I write is important. Several of the romantic scenes in Paris were written with Debussy’s String Quartet, his L’Apres-midi d’une Faune, or Canteloube’s Songs of the Auvergne playing in the background.

I do extensive research before I begin writing, but only a fraction of the research goes into the novels. The writer does not need to tell the reader everything. But one hopes that the writer's belief in his characters is evident in the telling, just as the mood created in the writer’s mind comes through in the atmosphere of the scene described. Also, if one is to portray life realistically, our characters will be imperfect people like ourselves, our families and friends. That is what's moving about them.

Two other things I have learned in writing these large and complex novels. The first is that, whenever I am beginning a book, or a big chapter with a new setting and cast of characters, I often fall asleep as I try to get them all to come together in my head. At these times, an observer would conclude that I was not working at all.

In fact, my subconscious is very busy. A deep gestation is going on and eventually the new story creates itself and the characters take on a life of their own.

Finally, the big question is not when to start the writing day but when to end it. Hemingwaysaid he would never cease until he knew exactly what was coming next. Never stop at the end of a chapter, in other words. End when the first paragraph of the next chapter is clear in your head. This way one can pick up the thread straight away the following day.